Since the publication of The Embodied Mind (1991), the cognitive sciences have been turning away from the mind-as-program analogy that dominated early cognitivism towards a conception of cognitive functioning as embodied in a living organism and embedded in an environment. In the past few years, important contributions to embodied-embedded cognitive science can be found in Noe (Action in Perception), Chemero (Radical Embodied Cognitive Scie Rnce), Thompson (Mind in Life), Clark (Being There and Surfing Uncertainty), and Wheeler (Reconstructing the Cognitive World).
[A note on terminology: the new cognitive science was initially called “enactivism” because of how the cognitive functions of an organism enact or call forth its world-for-it. This lead to the rise of “4E cognitive science — cognition as extended, embedded, embodied, and enacted. At present the debate hinges on whether embodied-embedded cognitive science should dispense with the concept of representation in explaining cognitive function. Wheeler and Clark drop “enaction” because they retain an explanatory role for representation, even though representations are action-oriented and context-sensitive.]
The deeper philosophical background to “the new cognitive sciences” includes Hubert Dreyfus, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and J. J. Gibson (who was taught by one of William James’s students). It is a striking fact that embodied-embedded cognitive science promises to put an anti-Cartesian, anti-Kantian critique of intellectualism on an scientific (empirical and naturalistic) basis. Embodied-embedded cognitive science is a fruitful place where contemporary cognitive science meets with the best (in my view) of 19th- and 20th-century Eurocentric philosophy.
That’s important for anyone who thinks, with Peirce, that science has some uniquely epistemic position because scientific practices allow the world to get a vote in what we say about it (Peirce contra Rorty).
The philosophical implications of embodied-embedded cognitive science are quite fascinating and complicated. Here’s one I’ve been thinking about the past few days: embodied-embedded cognitive science can strengthen Kant’s critique of both rationalist metaphysics and empiricist epistemology.
Kant argues that objectively valid judgments (statements that can have a truth-value in some but not all possible worlds) require that concepts (rules of possible judgment) be combined with items in a spatio-temporal framework. But Kant was never able to explain how this “combination” happened; and as a result subsequent philosophers were tempted to either reduce concepts to intuitions (as in Mill’s psychologistic treatment of logic) or reduce intuitions to concepts (as in the absolute idealism of Fichte and Hegel). As C. I. Lewis and Sellars rightly saw, however, neither Mill nor Hegel could be right. Somehow, receptivity and spontaneity are both required and they must somehow be combined (at least some degree). But how?
Andy Clark’s “predictive processing” model of cognition (in Surfing Uncertainty) offers a promising option. According to Clark, we should not think of the senses as passively transmitting information to the brain; rather, the brain is constantly signaling to the senses what to expect from the play of energies across receptors (including not only exteroceptive but also interoceptive and proprioceptive receptors). The task of the senses is to convey prediction errors — to indicate how off the predictions were so that the predictions can be updated.
And this bidirectional flow of information takes place between any different levels of neuronal organization — there’s top-down and sideways propagation from the ‘higher’ neuronal levels and also bottom-up propagation from the ‘lower’ neuronal levels (including, most distally, the receptors themselves).
Now, here’s the key move: the bidirectional multilevel hierarchy of neuronal assemblies matches (but also replaces) the Kantian distinction between the understanding (concepts) and the sensibility (intuitions). And it explains the one major thing that Kant couldn’t explain: how concepts and intuitions can be combined in judgment. They are combinable in judgment (at the personal level) because they have as their neurocomputational correlates different directions of signal propagation (at the subpersonal level).
But if embodied-embedded cognitive science allows to see what was right in Kant’s high-altitude sketch of our cognitive capacities, and also allows us to vindicate that sketch in terms of empirical, naturalistic science, it also thereby strengthens both Kant’s critique of empiricism (because top-down signal propagation is necessary for sense receptors to extract any usable information about causal structure from energetic flux), and his critique of rationalism (because the proper functioning of top-down signal propagation is geared towards successful actions, and our only source of information about whether our predictions are correct are not is the bottom-up prediction errors).
And because we can understand, now, both spontaneity and receptivity in neurocomputational terms as two directions of information flow across a multilevel hierarchy, we can see that Kant, C. I. Lewis, and Sellars were correct to insist on a distinction between spontaneity and receptivity, but wrong about how to understand that distinction — and we can also see that Hegel and neo-Hegelians like Brandom and McDowell are wrong to deny that distinction.
I’m afraid I don’t know Millkan’s work really, but I’ll keep that criticism in mind when I read Beisecker’s article.
Having finished Surfing Uncertainty, I’m more confident in my initial suggestion that the two directions of information flow in the multi-level hierarchies Clark posits correspond roughly to the phenomenological distinction between coping and sensing, and to the transcendental distinction between spontaneity and receptivity.
(All these are technical terms that need to be spelled out carefully, I know.)
The hard part here will be to keep track of the personal/subpersonal distinction and the phenomenological/neurocomputational distinction when talking about “representation”, “perception”, “action” and related terms. We want to be clear about what we’re doing when we talk about what animals do and what we’re doing when we talk about what brains do.
The code is not chemistry. It is implemented in chemistry.
Just like languages are not dots on LCD screens. Or Morse Code is not pulses on telegraph wires.
I agree this is a philosophical issue at best and irrelevant to the science used in understanding the mechanisms by which the biochemistry of DNA replication developed, how it contributes to the phenotype of an organism, and its role in the evolution of species.
A Proper Understanding of Millikan is a nice intro. Of course, Millikan’s theory has problems, perhaps fatal ones.
And it what sense (if any) can we say the subpersonal explains the personal.
I think building that relation is Dennett’s project on design versus intentional stance and hence on syntactical versus (as-if-or-emergent) semantic engines. Or it would be if he were a lot younger.
BTW, maybe Dennett would be OK with “emergent intentionality” for the real patterns picked out by the intentational stance?
The abstraction of DNA translation can be called a code, but in implementation, there are things happening that would be considered unacceptable in a computer program.
Uncorrected errors in copying and translation, for example. Mutations that are not copy errors.
The abstraction drops important features of the system.
TAMSZ loves Daniel Dennett. He was the primary cause of Lizzie losing her Catholic faith! 😉 And that’s the main kind of dehumanising figures that minority skeptics here take seriously. Superficial philosophistry and absurdity aside.
What’s not to love?
A beard to rival Brandom! You should consider facial hair, Gregory. It might give you some gravitas. 🙂
I’m going to assume that your academic work is as sloppy as your recreational musings. I could be wrong, but I doubt it, in this instance.
Are oak tree rings a code because the number of them map to the number of years the tree has been in existence? Do they constitute a (formal) language?
That’s a really nice way of framing the problem — what does it mean to say (and should we say?) that the subpersonal “explains” the personal? Is the relation between subpersonal-level to personal-level one of explanans to explanandum? On what conception of explanation could that be an intelligible claim? How would we determine if it is true?
I don’t know. I think that Dennett’s stance/pattern distinction is very Kantian; it’s actually a descendant (via Sellars) of Kant’s phenomena/noumena distinction. And that’s problematic in certain ways because the intentionality isn’t in the patterns; it isn’t “real”. The intentionality is all in the stance.
It’s not that, when Dennett denies that there is original intentionality, he is saying that all intentionality is derived. He’s saying something more subversive — he’s saying that the very distinction between original and derived intentionality should be rejected. All there is to the question “is there real intentionality?” is “is it useful to adopt the intentional stance?”.
Dennett’s version of pragmatism is actually quite deeply influenced by (I almost said “infected by”) an anti-realist, phenomenalistic empiricism that he (and also Rorty) get from Quine, and ultimately from Carnap and the whole HumeanMachian and also neo-Kantian/constructivist traditions. There’s a lot of Mach and Cassirer in Carnap that then gets transmitted to Quine and to Dennett as well, in which objects are constituted as real though the stances taken towards them.
What has gotten lost in this trajectory is the possibility (and I would say the necessity) of being both constructivists and realists, as Hegel and Dewey tried to be, and as Margolis has recently revived. It’ll take a while of working through Margolis’s material before I’m in a good position to see how his constructivist realism applies to the question of intentionality, esp. animal intentionality, and to the subpersonal/personal discussion. Margolis is harshly critical of Dennett and of Churchland, but his criticisms are mostly correct.
What Dennett believes can be obscure. Beisecker put it this way: “However, as is so characteristic of his work, Dennett’s true sentiments are much harder to divine”. (Beisecker’s paper, at one level, is an extended argument for the incompleteness of Dennett as detailed by Millikan).
But as I mentioned above, in Intuition Pumps, Dennett makes a point of telling philosophers who are reading that an explanation of one of his thought experiments based on microcauses is meant as a refutation of an interpretation that Dennett thinks content is epiphenomenal. So he definitely is not saying content or intentionality is unreal. How real it becomes because of usefulness to an ascriber taking the intentional stance is a different matter, of course.
I like Andy Clark’s reading (surprise) of Dennett in Mindware. First, Clark says that the causes ascribed to intentional content must pass the test of a scientific manipulation, ie the Woodward approach to finding real causation, and not for example be grated merely on the basis of FP or a plain counterfactual argument.
Then Clark says these person-level but scientifically validated causes gain their causal powers by the underlying micro-causes (he calls them scattered causes) which reflect concrete causal powers of entities in the brain, body, and world.
I am not sure how that question relates to my post.
Also, I claim priority on bringing up tree rings in the context of Mung-threads. (!).
(ETA to correct:) Those two points aside, the answer to your question is: no, physical tree rings and physical tree age are neither a formal language nor a code, since both of the latter are mathematical objects.
I don’t know enough about tree rings to say whether one could define a formal language or mapping from them the way I used DNA replication to define a formal language. You’d have to discretize the ring widths for starters, I guess.
A code as I understand it to be defined by Mung is not a computer program..
Errors in implementation do not detract from it being a code. If someone enters the wrong number of dots and dashes when using Morse code, that does not mean Morse is not a code.
Yes, abstractions drop important features. That is the nature of scientific models of course, and the genetic code can be considered such, I think.
Why is this so important to you, Petrushka? I’m not denying you are correct about the science, only saying the philosophy is different.
That all seems right to me, both about the importance of intervention in discerning real causes and about the underlying “micro-causes” of macro-level causal powers. I’ll take a closer look at Mindware. I also recommend Clark’s Being There if you haven’t read it yet.
That argument is in starting p 57 in paperback 2nd edition.
I like Clark’s philosophy, but I need to take a break from his writing style. I do have a copy of the Supersizing book; I’ll also look at Being there.
I’ve posted my reasons a dozen times.
The genetic code as abstracted is not capable of modelling living processes. This is because emergent chemical phenomena cannot be modeled. Things like protein folding are not algorithmic.
I believe Mung, in one post, alluded to finding the protein folding algorithm. There is no such thing.
I am not trying to do anything like formal philosophy. I am more nearly expressing a bet that chemistry does things that cannot be designed from first principles. My bet is that designing life without evolution, without cut and try, is impossible. It’s not something that can be derived from axioms. Its a bet.
At a somewhat lower level, designing a replicator implementing the genetic code will be done by playing with chemical evolution, if at all. It will not be done by devising a system in a mind and manufacturing it. It is not a problem that can be solved by logic.
OK, peace (h/t FMM)
On a related note, I don’t think tree rings/tree ages type of mapping is of much interest to science, unlike the genetic code.
A scientific realist might claim metaphysical reality for the genetic code but not for tree rings, partly because of that difference between the two in importance to scientific explanation and theory.
Also, I think a biosemiotician in the Pattee stripe might take a similar view of the two. As I understand Pattee’s version of biosemiosis (mostly from this guy), the discipline sees codes as playing a causal role with respect to regulating physical processes; here cause is meant in the sense of formal cause. I don’t think biosemiosis would take any tree ring/tree age mapping that way.
Alan Fox,
Two of the Horsemen, plus Jerry Coyne? You’re going to scare off all the IDCists with those kinds of images.
FWIW, I don’t understand this. Why is DNA replication a formal language (and mathematics) but the tree rings are a formal language (or mathematics). Can you explain this slowly for the layperson? Thanks.
Bruce,
You could have asked. Instead, you seemed to want to end the discussion:
Let me elaborate on my responses to your two points.
You wrote:
I responded by arguing that the evolved ability to name things (such as applying the nonsense name “Scroopy” to my cat) is not a norm:
That remains true even though the ability in question was selectively favored by an environment in which shared linguistic norms were the norm, so to speak.
Had that ability evolved in a non-social environment, would you argue that ‘Scroopy’ didn’t really refer to my cat, because there were no social norms on which the intentionality could rest?
I responded:
The first creature who used a word to refer to something else, by whatever criteria you specify, was not following in anyone else’s footsteps.
So I had already addressed your two points before quoting Wittgenstein. The Wittgenstein excerpt was in response to this:
I took you to be saying that my private usage of ‘Scroopy’ wasn’t really private, citing Wittgenstein’s argument that private languages are impossible.
I quoted Wittgenstein to emphasize that what he meant by “private language” was quite different from the private naming I engaged in by calling my cat “Scroopy”.
….but the tree rings are NOT….
The absurdity of TAMSZ ‘moderators’ (/ ‘administrators’) is now visible. Who Guano’d my comment? What is the explanation for this action?
I asked Alan Fox to upload a photo, just as he uploaded a photo. And for this, Guano?! Is this site an example of anti-liberal idiocy?
”What’s not to love?”
Atheists of the world unite…uh, er, around what, unbelief?
Gregory,
I did. If you really don’t understand why, re-read your parenthetical comment in your first paragraph and then re-read Lizzie’s rules.
Oh, desperate ‘PATRICK’ now administrates!?!? ; ))))
This is a joke!
3/4 of the atheists here are guilty of such language, if those are actually the ‘rules.’
Yeah, give Administrator privilege to any idiot who calls themselves an ‘atheist’ and let ‘justice’ rule henceforth!! HAHAHA
Wait a second, there are no “depressing asshole atheists” at TAMSZ. Why? Because Patrick’s view of ‘freedom’ dictates it cannot be true 😉
Oh, wait, just remove the word ‘asshole’ and everything at TAMSZ will be fine?
This is good. It means hotshoe’s asinine ‘allowed’ vocabulary will be severely shrunk (it’s not very big to begin with, USA educated). So far fellow atheist Patrick obviously protects her language.
Gregory:
Oh, really, Alan? Actually, I’m on it already. With a few more greys than in my student days (yet still decades younger than more than a few TAMSZists here). 😉
Why not consider (“happy human beards” ***image*** forthcoming – already sent to Alan) compared with low lying Dennett?
p.s. I posted the image to Alan Fox hours ago; let’s see how long it takes him to post it (while scrubbing his fellow ‘administrator’)
That would depend on how you define unbelief.
I see that keiths has brought this up again in a recent post.
I agree with keiths on this point. I think there is such a thing as original intentionality (which disagrees with keiths). But I agree with him that it cannot be explained by norms.
And it isn’t just that there had to be a first case of intentionality before it was passed on through the culture. All intentionality has to be prior to norms.
I’ll steal a bit of Quine’s “gavagai” argument for this, though I’m not using it the same way.
According to the standard view of language acquisition, we acquire vocabulary ostensively. So a child sees an association of the use of the word “gavagai” with a rabbit, and thereby makes the association that “gavagai” appears to mean “rabbit”. But this is impossible unless the child can already have thoughts about rabbits and unless the child can already have thoughts about the word “gavagai”. So some sort of intentionality that is prior to norms is being assumed in that account of ostensive learning.
Gregory,
If you find any comments that you feel violate the rules but which have escaped the notice of an admin, please feel free to notify us in the Moderation Issues thread.
Your ‘us’ violates the rules. I asked nicely to simply post a photo. You instead behaved like a power-hungry atheist jerk. This is indeed a sad place.
This assumes there is a “thing” or a brain state that corresponds to thoughts about rabbits or words.
Beisecker starts off with the compelling assumption that intentionality is itself a normative concept — a thought aims at the object it purportedly represents, and it can either grasp the object or not, represent it correctly or not.
I find his dismissal of Davidson slightly too quick, because it is instructive to consider how badly wrong Davidson is, but that work has been done elsewhere.
I worry that his dismissal of Millikan-esque “biological intentionality” is also too quick. Beisecker endorses an expectation-mongering conception of animal intentionality. That by itself seems perfectly correct to me, and it also coheres quite nicely with Clark’s predictive-processing neurcomptuation.
But if we are going to say that the function of the brain is to actively sample exteroceptive, interoceptive, and proprioceptive signals in order to minimiz discrepancy between action-guiding predictions and sensory prediction errors, which is how animals causally implement expectations in their behavior, then we will almost certainly need something like Millikan’s teleofunctionalism in the background here as to how cognitive structures have any biological function at all.
And, it might be argued, Clark’s neurocomputational account lacks a strong enough evolutionary dimension — not least of which because it is not just that brains are actively sampling sensory signals in the rolling present of a short-term action-perception cycle, but also that organisms are actively exploring and affecting their environments in order to satisfy their vital needs, which means that sometimes the value of need-satisfaction will outweigh the cost of energetically expensive action. (This is basically an evolutionary solution to the dark room problem — for more on this, see “
Surprisal and Valuation in the Predictive Brain”“.)
I am also of the strong conviction that something like Tomasello’s shared intentionality hypothesis is correct, when it comes to understanding what is unique about human intentionality. We evolved the ability to individuate semantic contents with fine-grained precision using a public language because doing so immensely facilitates cooperation, and in particular allows us to deploy our individual inferential abilities in a common pool of communal inferential resources for solving shared problems — such as how best to track a wounded deer, remove toxins from a tuber, or construct a shelter.
But there can’t be shared intentionality in the hominin lineage if there isn’t individual intentionality in the hominid lineage. So there has to be a theory of animal individual intentionality, and that means a theory of non-social normativity. But Beisecker might be on the right track here, if expectations and surprisal are the right sorts of non-social, non-instituted norms, in a weak sense of norms. Expectation and surprisal might also be quite central to understanding animal inference.
DNA replication is not a formal language.
That BNR I give (the ::= stuff) is the definition for the formal language. Do you want me to try to explain that or are the Wiki links here and in previous good for you.
ETA: Just to be very clear, when the BNR uses strings like “A” or “Glycine” they mean nothing, they are just sequences of letters. It is the interpretation that assigns meaning to these strings.
DNA replication would be an interpretation or a model of that language. A soda pop-type dispenser where you pressed three letters and a test tube full of some amino acid popped out would be another.
All of the above assumes my vague memories of CS courses from some time long ago plus a quick scan of Wiki are good enough to get me near to correct. Constructive criticism from those who know better is welcomed.
Now to push my luck, under the DNA replication interpretation, a Tarski biconditional would be
“AAA maps to Glycine” is true iff AAA maps-to Glycine
where the “maps-to” on the Right Hand Side of the iff means as a result of correct DNA replication.
OK Gregory! Let the battle of the beards continue!
Alan Fox,
No, that’s not what I sent atheist Alan. You cut off the photo. Either send the instructions & I’ll post it myself or please just post what I sent, within the message I posted above. Thanks. Your foolish trio is hardly worth people’s attention.
Gregory,
This is your link, Gregory.
You have indicated that you asked Alan to post the photo. Now you are attacking Patrick for not doing what you asked Alan to do.
I’m not really making myself clear on this, so I am guessing I just cannot explain my understanding of the concept properly. But I’ll try one more time.
By philosophers definition, intentionality requires a standard of correctness, that is norms. It’s simply a matter of definition. If you want to talk about “intentionality”, you must deal with norms. This comes up always, especially for mental representations, when philosophers talk about naturalizing intentionality . That is, a providing a scientific account of how it works and how it developed which deals with norms in a way that does not beg the question by using non-scientific concepts, such as norms themselves.
You may not like that, you may say that any reference is intentionality and norms don’t matter. . That is fine. That is just not the way most philosophers (basically all AFAIK) define the word.
If I misunderstand that philosophers definition, then I’d appreciate being corrected with references to some standard source like SEP or IEP (not Wiki).
I don’t think the gavagai example is about the same issue. As I understand it, it has to do with there being a fact of matter about whether there is a single translation for a language based solely on behavior. Although I suppose correctness would enter into that somewhere as well. But it seems to be mixing two issues which can be separated.
ETA: Sorry, I did not read you use of gavagai before replying. My bad. Under your use, you say a child has to have thoughts about rabbits. But thoughts about objects is what intentionality is. So by definition, the child must have norms to have such thoughts. If he has thoughts about rabbits when looking at cats, then the content of his thoughts is rabbits but the target is cats, and the thought misrepresents the target.
Where do those norms come from? Can people use language without being involved in language-using communities. The link in IEP I originally provided says most philosophers would say no, they cannot.
Neil Rickert,
Stop. I wrote Alan a message to post the photo, after it didn’t work on site. Not to link it, nor to cut it.
Is this photo post administrator privilege? http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/philosophy-in-an-age-of-cognitive-science/comment-page-5/#comment-91168
It shouldn’t be that difficult.
But hey, the image slimy Alan posted, that’s a happy bearded guy! 🙂
BruceS,
I’m not quite sure about that, actually. I think that Beisecker is making a nice point about the deep connection between intentionality and normativity, but it’s part of his Pittsburgh-School pragmatism that he makes that connection. It’s not industry-standard among philosophers who wrestle with these issues. But I might be mistaken about that.
In any event, Beisecker takes the Pittsburgh School approach to intentionality and normativity, which Brandom has worked out nicely in the case of the intentionality of thought and language, and applies the same basic insights to animal intentionality. (I suspect that deep in the background here are worries about Millikan-esque biological intentionality worked out by John Haugeland, in “The Intentionality All-Stars” and other papers.)
On “Gavagai”: bringing Quine into this conversation is really problematic, because Quine categorically rejected intentionality of mental states (and intensionality of semantics) in favor of describing, with a purely extensional semantics, the correlation of observable sentences (uttered or inscribed) with observable irritations of sensory surfaces. It’s a very thin, and dare I say “scientistic” way of thinking about language. Put otherwise, for Quine there is no manifest image in the first place. He doesn’t see any need for a naturalistic theory of meanings or norms because they don’t exist in the Quineverse.
And how you define “atheist”. 🙂
Gregory,
What’s your problem, Gregory?
Bruce, you haven’t explained the essential difference that you see between the DNA sequences and other mappable natural pairs. That’s what I’m looking for. I can make a similar Tarski schema with any of them, I’d think. Why aren’t they all codes?
I’d like to post a counter-image to your image within my own post. How can I do that here?
You appear slimy so far in either 1) not doing it for me when I requested it, or 2) editing the photo that I requested you to post for me, or 3) not simply sending basic instructions.
The behaviour of ‘admins’ here at this TAMSZ is abhorrent.
3rd time repeated
Oh, really, Alan? Actually, I’m on it already. With a few more greys than in my student days (yet still decades younger than more than a few TAMSZists [see Guano for a more accurate appraisal] here). 😉
Why not consider (“happy human beards” ***image*** forthcoming) compared with low lying Dennett?